Promoting Products Organically on Pinterest

Pinterest is an often overlooked social media treasure trove for brands looking to promote their products to an engaged audience. However, the right brand can make big waves on the curation site. As Brittany Murals pointed out, “Very few marketers get Pinterest, which means there is opportunity left on the table”.

The ideal method to get your Pins in front of as many people as possible is to promote them through advertisement. However, promoting products organically on Pinterest should be included in your strategy. You cannot create a promoted Pinterest ad without already having Pins, so a solid board is the basis for any Pinterest strategy, paid or otherwise.

Organic content is at the heart of Pinterest, with user-generated content being the driving force of the site’s collections. You need to understand how to harness the power of your organic content and build your brand’s presence through organic Pinterest product promotion.

Create a Strategy

Before you begin filling out your digital scrapbook, you need to understand how Pinterest works. Pinterest is used by 150 million people monthly and more than a billion boards have been created to date. 81% of Pinners are female and millennials use Pinterest as much as they use Instagram.

A detailed Buyer Persona characterisation should tell you whether Pinterest is a likely watering hole for your target audience. Understanding the platform’s users will influence the decisions you make when it comes to your strategy.

As with any social media platform, consistency is key. Social Pilot point out that “Pinning consistently helps maximize…exposure and customer engagement with your brand.” Regular activity integrates you with the Pinterest community. Adding organic Pins to your profile regularly will keep your content fresh in people’s feeds.

So, how can you use organic Pinterest content to promote your products?

Intrigue

Pinterest is all about finding inspiration. As a platform, it allows users to collate and share ideas, activities, recipes and more. As such, your pins need to be inspirational and connect with users based on their interests; be that educational, artistic, motivational or instructional.

Pinterest Search

Pinterest users often rely on the in-built search function to discover new content. As a marketer, that means it’s time to engage your SEO brain. Approach this search function like any other and utilise the description option for pins. Marketing Land have noted that “Pin descriptions help drive user engagement”. Your pin descriptions should be optimised for keywords likely to be searched within Pinterest itself. These keyword-rich descriptions are incredibly useful for Pinterest’s search engine in understanding the content pinners will encounter, as well as giving users a clearer idea of the context your content is being presented in.

Pin Descriptions

Consider the style of your descriptions. You should only be describing the pin’s content, so brevity and clarity are equally important factors. One study found descriptions that were around 200 characters long were the most repinned.

Another element of pin descriptions to be mindful of are hashtags. While Pinterest does support the use of hashtags, they don’t always do the best job of describing your image and in some cases can work against you in Pinterest’s search engine, so use them sparingly.

External Links

Link your content to a product page or blog post. The benefits of including links to your website are threefold. Firstly, they will give pinners more context for understanding the content they’re being presented with. Secondly, attaching links to your pins will encourage users to find out more about your brand and your products through the pins you post. Thirdly, the external linking will boost your website’s SEO efforts.

Interest

Your pins need to be relevant to your brand and products. One way to create interesting content is to build boards on your profile with related content. Debenhams do this by creating boards specific to the brands they carry, while Kraft Recipes collect different recipe categories together, for example by season, emotion or food type.

Visuals

The pins themselves need to be visually appealing. Pinterest is all about the visuals – it’s what initially attracts users to specific content. You should ensure that you pin down (pardon the pun) your content’s look and feel, a visual identity, and use this to influence the content you create and share. The accounts that receive the highest number of interactions and subsequent traffic to websites are those with a strong, easily identifiable, attractive visual identity. Kraft Recipes is a great example of this, as are Burberry.

Content

It’s also important to create content that your audience want to see. Consider creating multiple boards which concentrate on more specific topics related to your business. You might create gift ideas boards, or seasonal collections. How-to boards are especially great for cosmetics and fashion brands to give examples of how products might be used or worn. Trend boards will keep your audience up to date with the latest industry and brand-specific news and prove that you’re in the know. Many brands use Pinterest to share behind the scenes content, too. By creating multiple boards, you create a more attractive profile, give your audience more specific content options, and gain the opportunity to cultivate your boards’ content with related images as they become relevant.

Organic Pinterest product promotion is only one element you should be considering for your Pinterest strategy – but it is important to stress how necessary it is for a well-rounded Pinterest business profile.

To learn how to leverage your now spectacular Pinterest boards into a product promotion machine, and which other social media platforms are best for your business, download our Advanced Guide to Social Media Ads.